Spiritual Orkney - A Place of Pagan Pilgrimage

Monday, 2 November 2015

The
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were times of great change and social
upheaval.The major belief system of
Christianity was being “reformed” from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism, new
ways of thinking were being introduced with the enlightenment, logic and
science were emerging as the preferred world-view, and the industrial
revolution was kicking off.Although
there is plenty of evidence that witches and witchcraft have been feared
throughout the past, during this period that fear took on a manic form which
some of us refer to as “the burning times”.

Life at this
time was pretty grim.There were huge
inequalities in society.Even if you had
wealth, maintaining it was a constant gamble.Insurance was embryonic in form.Existence was chaotic and unpredictable.

This is as
it has always been, and still is admittedly, but prior to the Reformation, the
Church (albeit at the price of social control) at least provided a rudimentary
welfare system and an accessible path to divinity in the
form of saints.Saints are very much for
the people, often being fallible, frail and fully human.The route to official (Vatican) recognition
of saints was much quicker than today so many saints would have been remembered
in life by those still living. (Footnote 1)

Into this
mix, a prevailing belief emerged of the world being in the grip of diabolic
forces.The devil and his works were
apparent everywhere.The world was not a
pleasant place, God was remote and the saints were no longer available: supernatural
threats abound coupled with a lack of celestial assistance.Add to this the many people around who were
believed to be witches, who had entered pacts with the devil and were able to
cause misfortune through malevolent sorcery – sometimes without even realising
it! (Footnote 2)

Thus, when
Roman Catholicism was supplanted by Protestantism, it left a spiritual vacuum
with which to deal with the realities of life (which for most people was short
and cruel, cheap even).

That gap
created a market which would be filled by purveyors of protection magic because
people naturally seek stability, security and control ...

To be clear,
prior to the middle of the twentieth century, there are two groups of people to
whom we, in historical hindsight, might apply the term “witch” but which it is
useful to think of as distinct groups:

Practitioners of folk magic and herb-craft – who have always existed at all times and in
all places – but who would not have thought of themselves as witches but rather
as Christians

Those accused of being witches (of whom there
may be some overlap with the first group)

Those who
belonged to the first group would be more akin to what anthropologists refer to
as “witch doctors” – not doctors using witchcraft to heal, but rather doctors
who treat patients who have been attacked by witchcraft.This is positive protection magic into which was
often incorporated Christian symbolism and references.

One of the
forms of protection offered was the “witch bottle”.Most often recovered from East Anglia, Essex
and Suffolk, they are known throughout Scotland and a couple have been found in
Orkney and are on display in the Orkney Museum.

These bottles are labelled
as “spirit bottles” in Orkney Museum but they are of the characteristic shape
and colour.The one numbered “15” was
found under the floor of a house at Digro on the island of Rousay.

Witch
bottles are usually small and round, about 10 cms high, often of blue or green
glass, but larger bottles were also used which were about 20 cms tall.These larger bottles are more famous and are
known as “Greybeards” or “Bellarmines”; they were made in Germany of glazed
stoneware decorated with bearded faces. In popular tradition they are associated with Cardinal
Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), a fierce opponent
of Protestantism in the Low Countries and northern Germany and these bottles
may originally have represented an attempt by Protestants to ridicule him.

Inside the
bottles were placed:

Hair, nail pairings and urine from the victim(s) – human or
animal

Iron nails, thorns, sharp glass, bent pins,
stick of wood

Felt or material, perhaps in the shape of a
heart, and often pierced with pins – possibly cut from the clothing of the
victim

It is the
urine of the victim that was the most important ingredient, sometimes the only
one.Joseph Blagrave of Reading in
“Astrological Practice of Physick” (1671) gives a recipe:

“Another way is to stop the urine
of the Patient, close up in a bottle, and put into it three nails, pins or
needles, with a little white salt, keeping the urine always warm: if you let it
remain long in the bottle, it will endanger the witches life: for I have found
by experience that they will be grievously tormented making their water with
great difficulty, if at all, and the more if the moon be in Scorpio in Square
or Opposition to his Significator, when its done.”

Blagrave
explains that the witch will be tormented through the medium of the victim’s
urine because the witch, in carrying out baleful magic, will necessarily create
a sympathetic link with the victim through which they can be counter-attacked.Often the identity of the witch was unknown,
so the sole means of identifying them was through the sympathetic link provided
by the victim’s urine, hair and nails.

The
“Bellarmines” may have been chosen because of their general anthropomorphic
qualities and it seems to have been believed that the bottle itself came to
represent the witch via image magic.Attracted to the link with the victim, the witch would become trapped
within the bottle so, once the witch bottle had been made and its contents
sealed inside, it would be buried outside a property, under the hearth or
threshold, or plastered into the walls.Sometimes the bottle was inverted before final deposition.At this point the counter-magic would start
to work!

The
roundness of the bottle itself was believed to be symbolic of the witch’s
bladder and it is through this organ that the witch was rendered particularly vulnerable.John Aubrey (1696) describes how a witch
bottle was made to protect a bewitched horse, reporting that subsequently the
“party suspected to be the witch ... could not make water, of which he
died”.

Glanvil
(1681) recounts how a witch bottle was not buried but rather placed upon a fire
and heated – a faster and more dangerous method whereby the witch would survive
if the cork flew out during heating and the bottle remained intact!This practice, of course, would leave completely
different archaeological evidence to a buried bottle – if any at all.

Historical
documents also include descriptions of how the “witch”, or their husband or
wife, would appear in person and ask for the magic to be stopped, or to make
accusations that the magic was harming them.What is
interesting about one of the “spirit” bottles on display in the Orkney Museum
was where it was found.The house at
Digro on the island of Rousay was where James Leanard lived in the nineteenth
century.Rousay was the only place in
Orkney where the clearances took place, reputedly by General Sir Frederick
William Traill Burroughs, the major landowner who lived at Trumland House.Burroughs caused bitter resentment amongst
his tenants by raising rents and evicting them and, when the Napier Royal
Commission visited Orkney in 1883, two of his crofters submitted evidence – one
of them being James Leanard, who was subsequently evicted for doing so!Could this particular spirit / witch bottle
have been placed as a defence against “the Little General” with the reputation
of being “the worst of the nineteenth century lairds in Orkney”?

Why make a witch-bottle?

The fear of
“ill-wishing” was and still can be quite disabling for some people, to the
extent of being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Measures to counter it are still alive today
and have their uses for the magical practitioner, usually in the form of curse
lifting and reversals.A witch-bottle
can be a useful addition to our psychic armoury, especially today when we can
draw parallels between our rapidly changing society and that of the seventeenth
century.Our society also has huge inequalities, with the maintenance of wealth (for
those who have it) being a constant gamble (leading some to take insane risks),
“changes” to welfare provision, and life continuing to be precarious and random
for very many people. And people,
including myself and my “clients”, still seek stability, security and control over
an unpredictable and chaotic world ...

Whether a
witch-bottle fits into your personal morality is of course your decision.This is, after all, not purely protective
magic but defensive counter-magic.It’s
up a notch from “An it harm none”.Make
your own choices in this, bearing in mind the magical repercussions – a
valuable lesson from all of this is the generation of sympathetic links: and I
will certainly be contemplating how often I might inadvertently create them!

For myself,
I feel the need to craft and maintain protective measures not against
individuals but against corporations and organisations, some of whom don’t seem
to appreciate my inclination to being a square peg and some of whom are definitely
malevolent in intent (in my opinion).

How to make a witch-bottle (a.k.a. witchy insurance
policy):

Take a
bottle, dark glass, and rounded if possible.Any size.If it has
anthropomorphic features even better.Add
something from yourself, urine is ideal (see below).And some bent pins, iron is good.Some white table salt (good occult stand-by
ingredient).Seal the bottle with a cork
or original top, then bury or hide it.

I like to
put it at a boundary (liminal place) rather than inside the house but if you
don’t have a garden then inside a window box or plant pot would do.Some of the historical documents suggest that
the magic runs out when the liquid does so you may need to keep it “topped up”!Do all this at the appropriate moon phase
(waning or dark) and check the astrology if that is something you’d usually
do.Saturday might be an appropriate day
to Work (although I am of the opinion that if you need to do something, then
you should just get on and do it).Probably then an idea not to talk about it at all but just let it get on
with its thing.

If someone or
something does subsequently pop by and ask you to stop doing what you’re doing
to them, it might be polite to invite them to “agree to terms” over a cuppa tea
...

As to the choice
of something from yourself:Urine is sterile
at the point it comes out of your body and with its associations with bodily
waste it’s something you don’t want any more and is ideal for these purposes.It doesn’t smell as bad as poo and isn’t as
messy to get in the bottle (or so I would imagine).Ear-wax and bogeys – do you really make
enough of these to go in a bottle?!Blood is a possibility, but do exercise safety precautions when
obtaining it such as using sterile equipment and not doing yourself any injury
that requires a visit to A&E, although like semen and saliva it’s probably
too much of a “life essence”; I suspect that using menstrual blood would be
viable (if you still produce it).Alternatively you could use your tears if you can collect enough – I
like this concept for environmental and social protection workings as tears
would be highly charged.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carr-Gomm, P
& Heygate, R (2009) The Book of English Magic, The Overlook Press, New York

Footnote 1 - Personally, I can see similarities between the veneration of saints and
ancestral worship / propitiation and can even fit saints into an eclectic Pagan
theology with a little nudging and shifting!

Footnote 2 - Anthropologists advise that, around most of the world, this is still what is
meant by “witch”, the term is used differently to how we Pagans use it.

Monday, 14 July 2014

One of my favourite pastimes in
Orkney is beachcombing; I search for things which appeal to me because they are
attractive or unusual or because they may be useful.I usually waddle home with pockets bulging
with sandy treasures!

A while ago I attended a fieldtrip
with Orkney Archaeology Society to look for flints at the Pool of Cletts (a
beach on South Ronaldsay – one of the linked south isles).Flint does not occur naturally in Orkney, so
any used in prehistory would either have been imported or must have been washed
up on the various beaches.We were
instructed in flint identification by a geologist and our aim was to investigate whether there might have been sufficient
flint being washed up to explain the quantities of flint found in excavation
(because if there wasn’t, it was a possible indicator that the flint would have
had to have been imported, and hence traded, in prehistory).

I didn’t find any flint!What I found were some iridescent shells, a
lump of red sandstone in the shape of a romantic heart, and lots of lucky stones
with natural holes in them.Everyone
else, without exception, found flint.I
stood smiling to excuse my eccentric collection ... the geologist even took
pity on me and let me have some of his flint as a consolation prize ... it was
one of my more Moomintroll moments.

As a fully paid up Pagan, my home is
full of crystals and rocks all quietly buzzing away ... they bring me luck and
keep me safe and look pretty.These
beliefs are old beliefs and I’m sure my magpie-tendencies would have been
recognised by our ancestors because I have noted that white quartzite stones
turn up at all manner of prehistoric sites – there seems to have been an almost
archetypal attraction for them, most famously perhaps on the facade at
Newgrange, Ireland.

The class of artefact called charm-stones,
or cold-stones, are especially interesting.Charm-stones are found in northern Scotland and the northern islands, and
date from the first millennium AD, (commonly referred to as the Pictish period
which lies between when the Iron Age finishes c.300AD and the Viking period
begins c.800AD).They are made from
quartzite pebbles about 20mm by 55mm in size.About 20 examples are known and several have been found in Orkney,
particularly from the site of Buckquoy in Birsay (and on display in the Orkney
Museum, Tankerness House, Broad Street, Kirkwall).All known charm-stones have been painted with
simple designs using a pigment which now presents as dark brown in colour.The motifs include dots, wavy lines, small
circles, pentacles, crescents, and triangles; hence, they are also known simply
as “painted pebbles”.

It is generally believed that these
charm-stones had a magical nature.Perhaps they were lucky sling-stones or stones used for healing?There is a long and rich tradition of
curing-stones that could be used to heal and such beliefs are documented
throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the medieval period.This tradition has subsequently been immortalised
in folklore and even referenced as being practiced within living memory.In Orkney, several of my “indigenous” friends
tell me they used to collect “lucky” white quartz stones from the beach when
they were bairns.

These are the
Pictish Charm-Stones on display in the Orkney Museum

Often the curative qualities of the
stones are associated with early Christian saints.For example St Columba was said to have cured
King Bridei of Pictland with a white stone pebble in 565AD.There are also the Curing-Stones of St Fillan
(Perthshire) and St Molio (Arran), and the “Blessed Stones” of the Isle of
Bute.The treatment was made effective either
through the stone(s) being carried or more often by the stone(s) being placed
or boiled in water or milk and the resultant liquid being used to treat the
patient or drunk as a potion.

Although the pigment used to decorate
these stones has not been accurately analysed, it is possible that the dye used
would have been a natural one such as haematite.I have experimented with making my own copies
using powdered haematite mixed with a natural fixative (the latter in the form
of beaten egg).The results are quite
true to the original and the pigment has stayed on the stones even after
several years.Powdered haematite can be
purchased from art shops – although you’ll probably have to order it in as it
mainly has a specialist use in icon painting today.

My own copies of Pictish Charm-Stones

I’m going to carry on placing my faith
in lucky stones, because they seem to have worked so far in my life and it is a
fine tradition with an impeccable lineage.And I refuse to curb my inner Moomintroll which insists on taking a
childish delight in wild things found at random.At Iona earlier this year, I sought and
brought back several lovely examples of Iona marble, a natural serpentine mixed
with quartz which makes a very attractive white and green stone, often polished
by the sea.You have to walk right to
the south of Iona to find it, as it only washes up on Columba’s Bay, so the
journey becomes a bit of a pilgrimage as this is an ancient pathway and a bit
treacherous in places.It is said that
if you carry a piece of Iona marble you will never drown ... I gifted a piece
to one of my more cynical friends who assured me that the magic was working as he
had had several baths since and hadn’t drowned once!

About Me

I am a Pagan and spiritual seeker living in Orkney and working as a tourist guide and legal Celebrant (refer to www.spiritualorkney.co.uk/tours for more information on guided tours of Orkney). Together with my husband, we are the Scottish Pagan Federation Local Reps, Interfaith Officers and Celebrants for Orkney. I also write articles on Orkney as a spiritual place.